Appendix C
A Working Framework for Pastors, Lay Leaders, and Christians Engaging NDE Testimony
A woman in her early seventies came to my study one afternoon with a paperback in her hand and a question on her face. Her sister had died eight months earlier. The book was one of the popular near-death experience memoirs that fill the shelves at airport bookstores. She had read it twice. She wanted to know whether she should believe it. More than that, she wanted to know whether she should let it shape what she now believed about her sister.
I did not give her a quick answer. I did not have one. The book she had brought me contained passages that any Christian could read with gratitude — accounts of a luminous, loving Presence; a sense of being known; a profound moral seriousness about the way we treat one another. The same book also contained passages that no Christian can simply absorb — claims about reincarnation, an open dismissal of Christ's uniqueness, a framing of every religion as equally a path to "the Light." She had been moved by the first set of passages and unsettled by the second. She was not asking me to tell her whether her sister was at peace. She was asking me how to think about a book that was, by turns, beautiful and biblically wrong.
That afternoon convinced me that pastors and lay Christians need a working framework for this kind of question. We need it because near-death experience testimony has become part of the cultural air. Ordinary people read these books, watch these videos, listen to podcasts featuring experiencers. Some are well-grounded believers; some are searchers; some are grieving. They walk into our churches, into our hospital chaplaincy offices, into our conversations with the dying, and they ask us what to make of what they have read or, sometimes, of what they themselves have lived through. We need to be ready. Not skeptical for skepticism's sake. Not credulous because the stories are touching. Discerning.
This appendix is that framework. It draws on my dissertation's analysis of 5,278 NDE cases1 and on the more developed theological treatment in Chapter 30. The chapter argues the case at length; this appendix gives you the practical tools — criteria, categories, conversation patterns, recommendations, a worksheet — to take into the next pastoral encounter, the next book-club conversation, the next coffee with a parishioner who has just had something happen and does not know what to do with it.
I want to say one thing at the outset. The goal of Christian discernment is not to dismiss NDE testimony. It is not to protect the church from a phenomenon that, on close examination, is one of the most remarkable empirical confirmations of historic Christian anthropology I have ever seen.2 The goal is the opposite. We discern so we can receive what God may be saying through these accounts without also receiving what He is not. We test the spirits, as John tells us to (1 John 4:1), so that we can hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Discernment is not skepticism. It is the careful work of love.
One word, before we move on, about what kind of work this appendix is doing. The Christian church has, across two thousand years, developed a deep tradition of discerning extraordinary spiritual experience — visions, dreams, prophetic words, charismatic phenomena, contemplative encounter, deathbed visions.17 The frameworks in this appendix are not new. They are the same instruments the church has used for centuries, applied to the particular contours of NDE testimony. If you have ever helped a parishioner think through whether a vivid dream was from God, you already know how to do most of this work. What changes when we apply that same discernment to NDE accounts is mainly the empirical layer — the verifiable observations made during clinical death — which adds a new kind of confirmation that the older instruments did not have to handle. The discernment task itself, however, is the church's old and steady one.
Before we get to criteria and categories, we need to get the framing right. Most disagreements I have seen between Christians on NDE testimony are not really disagreements about the cases. They are disagreements about what kind of thing an NDE report is, and where it sits in the Christian's frame of authority. Get the framing wrong and the criteria will not help you.
An NDE account is not Scripture. It is not a vision in the prophetic-canonical sense. It is not a fresh revelation, and no NDE report — however moving, however well-documented, however biblically congenial — can carry the authority of the inspired Word.3 If a pastor or teacher ever frames an NDE account as if it were on the same shelf as the Gospel of John, that pastor has made a serious category error, and the resulting theology will be unstable. Scripture is the rule. NDE testimony is not.
What, then, is an NDE account? It is something more familiar than we sometimes admit. It is a personal testimony of an extraordinary experience — like the testimony of a missionary who reports an unusual answered prayer, or a believer who reports a vivid dream during a season of grief, or a saint of an earlier era who reports a moment of contemplative encounter. We have always known how to handle these. We listen. We rejoice in what is true and beautiful. We test what is reported against the standard of Scripture. We hold loosely the parts that bear no theological weight. We hold firmly the parts that do.
What makes NDE testimony interesting — and worth this appendix — is that it has, on top of the personal-testimony layer, a layer of verifiable content. The veridical NDE cases (the cases analyzed in Chapter 8 and Chapter 10) include reports of accurate distant observation during periods of documented absence of brain activity. That layer is not a claim about doctrine. It is a claim about the structure of human nature: that consciousness can persist when the brain is, by every available measure, not producing it.4 That layer of NDE testimony provides empirical support for what Scripture and the historic Christian tradition have always taught about the soul.
Note — Two Different Things
It helps to keep these layers distinct. The veridical layer of an NDE — the verifiable observations made during clinical death — is the layer that bears empirical weight. The interpretive layer — the experiencer's account of what the encounter means, what religion is true, what happens next — is a personal testimony that requires the same careful discernment we would bring to any believer's report of an extraordinary inner experience. Mixing these layers is the most common error I see in popular treatments. A pastor who has these two layers clearly distinguished will rarely go wrong.
One more first principle. NDEs are not uniform in their theological content. They are uniform in their core phenomenology — out-of-body awareness, transition through some kind of boundary, an encounter with a loving Presence, life review, and so on — but the way an experiencer describes and interprets those elements varies a great deal with the experiencer's prior religious framework.5 The Pentecostal who has an NDE often comes back talking about Jesus by name. The lifelong Buddhist often comes back talking about the Light or about cosmic compassion. The committed secularist often comes back talking about something he cannot name. The structure of the encounter is remarkably consistent across these cases. The interpretation is not. That is exactly what Christian theology would predict — that every human person encounters the same God, but every human person interprets that encounter through the only frame they have.
So here is the first principles list, set out plainly:
— Scripture is the rule. NDE testimony is not.
— An NDE account is a personal testimony, not a fresh revelation.
— The veridical layer (verifiable observations) and the interpretive layer (the experiencer's theology) are different things and need to be evaluated differently.
— The core phenomenology is remarkably consistent across cases. The interpretive overlay is not.
— Christian discernment is not skepticism. It is the careful work of receiving what is true and refusing what is not.
With the framing in place, here are the five criteria I use when I sit with an NDE account, whether in a popular book or in a pastoral conversation. They are not original to me. They draw on the broader Christian tradition of testing spiritual experience — Jonathan Edwards's Religious Affections,6 the Catholic mystical tradition's discernment of spirits, the Pentecostal-evangelical tradition's testing of charismatic phenomena. I have refined them through my dissertation work and laid them out here in the order I find most useful pastorally.
Does the encounter point toward Christ, or away from Him? This is the first question, and in some ways it is the only question that matters.18 Christ is the criterion of all Christian discernment. He said so Himself: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Any spiritual experience that ends up turning the experiencer toward Christ — toward His person, His call, His cross — has at minimum survived the most important test. Any experience that turns the experiencer away from Christ — toward another mediator, toward a religion-less universalism that bypasses Him, toward a gospel of self-discovery — has, at minimum, failed the most important test, whatever else it may have included.
It is worth being precise here. The criterion is not whether the experiencer used the name "Jesus" during the encounter. Many Christian NDErs do; many do not. Vicki Umipeg, the congenitally blind woman whose case we examine in Chapter 11, describes a luminous Being who knows her completely; she identifies the Being as Christ on the basis of Christian frame.19 Other Christian experiencers describe the same kind of encounter without ever speaking the name. The criterion is whether the encounter, in its content and its fruit, draws the person toward the historic Christ or away from Him.
An NDE that produces a deep, costly, biblically grounded turn toward Christ has weight. Howard Storm's account is the clearest example I know.7 Storm went into his medical crisis a religiously hostile secular university art professor; he came out a confessing Christian who eventually entered the pastorate.20 The fruit was Christ-shaped, in a man's life, over years. That kind of fruit is not nothing. It is, in fact, a great deal.
An NDE that produces a polite drift away from Christ — the experiencer becomes warmly "spiritual," begins to teach that "all paths lead to the same Light," ceases to need the cross, ceases to need atonement — has equally clear fruit, and equally clear weight, and the weight is on the other side of the scale. The Lord Himself gave us this criterion: "You will recognize them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16).
Does the content of the experience, as the experiencer reports it, fit with what Scripture teaches about the human soul, the moment of death, the postmortem encounter, the love and the holiness of God, the final judgment? Or does it contradict these things at significant points?
My dissertation found that 87 percent of the qualitative NDE cases in the analyzed dataset showed high or moderate compatibility with biblical anthropology and eschatology.8 That is a striking number, and it deserves to be sat with. It means that the dominant pattern of NDE testimony — separation of conscious self from body, encounter with deceased Christian relatives, encounter with a loving and morally serious Presence, life review, an awareness of judgment, sometimes a return to embodied life — looks far more like the picture the Christian tradition has painted than like any of the alternatives the modern world has proposed (annihilation at death; reincarnation; cosmic absorption; the dissolution of the self).
But it also means that 13 percent of cases — roughly one in eight — contained content that does not fit. That percentage is small but real, and it is the percentage we are talking about when we talk about discernment. Reincarnation imagery (a "previous life," instructions to "come back" through another body); pluralist content ("every religion is the same path"); content that explicitly contradicts Scripture about Christ, the cross, or the moral law — these are the elements that pastoral discernment has to handle. We will get to them in the next section.
Key Argument
The 87 percent finding is not the claim that every NDE account is reliable. It is the claim that the broad shape of NDE testimony fits the historic Christian picture of dying far better than any of the modern alternatives. Discernment handles the 13 percent that does not fit. The discernment task is, in this sense, much narrower than skeptical Christians sometimes assume — not "is the whole phenomenon trustworthy?" but "which elements of this account fit, and which do not?"
Does the encounter affirm or deny the Trinity? This criterion is more subtle, because most NDE accounts do not say much explicitly about the doctrine of the Trinity in the technical sense. But every account implies something about the relation between the experiencer's encounter and the God revealed in the gospel.
An NDE whose Being is described in ways consistent with the Triune God — personal, holy, infinitely loving, morally serious, drawing the person toward repentance and faith — is at least Trinitarianly congruent, even if the experiencer never uses the language. An NDE whose "Being" is impersonal (a force, a cosmic field, "the All"), or whose "Being" is one of a plurality of equally legitimate divine figures, or whose "Being" frames itself as identical with the experiencer ("you are God too") — that account has fundamental theological problems and cannot be received uncritically.
The Christological criterion (Criterion 1) and the Trinitarian criterion (Criterion 3) usually move together. An encounter that points to Christ tends, on closer examination, to be coherent with the Triune God. An encounter that drifts toward "I am God, you are God, we are all One" is at the same time a denial of the historic Christ and a denial of the Triune God.
What did the experience produce in the experiencer's life? Not just immediately, but over years. This is the criterion the Lord Himself gave us, and it is the one I trust most heavily after Criterion 1.
NDE researchers have, somewhat to their own surprise, documented striking aftereffects in many experiencers — increased compassion, decreased materialism, decreased fear of death, deepened seriousness about moral life, frequent significant turns toward religious faith.9 Christian discernment can engage these findings without endorsing every interpretation given to them. We can ask the simple New Testament question: is the fruit of this experience, in this person's life, the kind of fruit the Holy Spirit produces? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). A turn toward Christ. A deepened life of prayer. A reconciliation with neighbors. A new compassion for the suffering.
Or is the fruit something else entirely? Spiritual pride. A new arrogance about the experiencer's special access. A drift away from the church and into a private spirituality. A new license to disregard moral teaching ("the Light told me there is no judgment, only love"). A teaching ministry that exalts the experiencer rather than Christ.
Time clarifies. The fruit of a true encounter with God ripens over years; the fruit of a misinterpreted or counterfeit encounter rots over the same period. A pastor with the patience to watch — not just for six months but for six years — will rarely be wrong about a particular NDEr's experience.
Are the theological claims drawn from the experience consistent with the historic creeds — the Apostles', the Nicene, the Chalcedonian Definition? This is the last criterion because it is the most stringent, and a single account's failure on this criterion does not always mean the account is worthless. Many sincere Christians have had experiences they then misinterpreted theologically. The experiencer may have taken away a wrong lesson from a real encounter. We are not testing the experiencer's whole theology; we are testing whether the experiencer's account, on the points where it speaks theologically, lines up with the rule of faith the church has confessed for two thousand years.
Where it does line up — where the experiencer comes back affirming the Triune God, the divinity and humanity of Christ, the reality of judgment, the necessity of grace — Criterion 5 is met and the account can be received with confidence on those points. Where it does not — where the experiencer comes back teaching denial of the Trinity, denial of Christ's uniqueness, denial of judgment, denial of the resurrection of the body — we have to say plainly that the experience did not authorize those teachings. The creeds are older and stronger than any one experiencer's interpretation of any one experience.
With the criteria in hand, we can sort the actual content of NDE accounts into four categories. Most published NDE memoirs contain a mix of categories, and the discernment work consists in seeing which category each particular element falls into. I have used this fourfold map in pastoral conversations and in my own reading; it has held up across thousands of cases.
Some NDE content is so consistent with the historic Christian theology of dying that the chief response is gratitude. This category includes:
An out-of-body phase in which the experiencer is conscious, perceiving, and morally aware while the body lies clinically inert. This is exactly what 2 Corinthians 5:8 ("away from the body and at home with the Lord") and Philippians 1:23 ("to depart and be with Christ") would predict.22
An encounter with a luminous, loving Presence experienced as personal, knowing, and morally serious. The encounter often produces both joy and a deep sense of being utterly known. This is the encounter that the descent tradition (Christ at every soul's death-threshold) has always anticipated.10
A life review in which the experiencer perceives the moral weight of their actions — not in legalistic accounting but in vivid awareness of how their choices affected others. A life review with strong moral seriousness, often producing repentance, is profoundly biblical (Romans 14:12; 2 Corinthians 5:10).23
The presence of deceased Christian loved ones who welcome the experiencer with love and lead them further. This fits the New Testament's "great cloud of witnesses" picture (Hebrews 12:1) and the historic Christian theology of the communion of saints.
A clear sense that "it is not yet your time" and a reluctant return to embodied life. The reluctance itself is striking — a person who has tasted the encounter does not, as a rule, want to come back.
When you read content of this kind, you can read it as a Christian, with Christian gratitude. The historic tradition has been teaching this for two thousand years; it now has empirical correlates that the tradition's earlier defenders could not have produced.
Some NDE content fits with biblical theology, but in a way that requires careful handling. The content is not wrong; it is incomplete or easy to misread.
"The Being of Light" not explicitly identified as Christ. Most NDE accounts describe the encountered Presence as "Light" or "a being of light" rather than naming Him. This is not, by itself, a problem. The same Light is described in 1 John 1:5 ("God is light, and in him is no darkness at all"), in 1 Timothy 6:16 ("who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light"), and in the Transfiguration narratives. Where a Christian experiencer comes back and identifies the Light as Christ, that identification is biblically sound. Where a non-Christian experiencer comes back and identifies the Light as "the universal Source," the identification is theologically wrong, but the underlying encounter is not necessarily wrong; it is the encounter described and interpreted through a different frame.
Cosmic-unity language. Many NDErs describe a sense of being "one with everything," of the boundaries between self and others dissolving, of an ocean of love. These descriptions are theologically dangerous if taken as evidence for pantheism or for the absorption of the self into "the All." But they need not be taken that way. Christian mystical writers across the tradition — Augustine, Bernard, Julian, Edwards — have used similar language to describe the soul's union with God in love.11 The Christian reading is that the experiencer has tasted what union with the Triune God is like (without ceasing to be a creature), not that the experiencer has discovered that selfhood is an illusion.
Non-judgmental love. NDErs frequently report a Presence whose love feels overwhelming and total, and who does not condemn. This is theologically fine — it is the love of God in Christ — provided we do not misread it as antinomianism. The same Presence, in the same encounters, often produces a piercing moral self-knowledge during the life review. The love and the holiness are inseparable. NDEr accounts that describe the love without the holiness are usually editing, not lying.
Time-distortion. Many experiencers describe time as "different" — slower, faster, all-at-once. This is consistent with Christian eschatology's hints about eternity (2 Peter 3:8; Revelation 10:6). It is not a basis for a theology of timeless eternity, but it is also not a problem.
Some NDE content is straightforwardly inconsistent with biblical theology and has to be handled as such. This is the 13 percent the dissertation identified, and it includes:
Reincarnation imagery. A meaningful number of NDE accounts include experiences interpreted as memories of past lives or instructions to "return through another body." This is incompatible with the Christian doctrine that we die once and then face judgment (Hebrews 9:27).24 Pastorally, the discernment task is to ask carefully what the experiencer actually saw versus what the experiencer (or the experiencer's later guides) made of it. Some "past life" content turns out, on examination, to be life-review content reinterpreted through an Eastern-religious frame the experiencer was already using.12 Some is more difficult to explain that way and has to be set aside as unreliable.
Religious pluralism. Some NDErs come back convinced that their experience proves that "all religions are paths to the same Light." The encounter itself does not establish this; the conclusion is the experiencer's interpretation. The Christological criterion (Criterion 1) does not allow us to receive that interpretation. We can affirm that God meets every dying person in love and that no one is excluded from the offer of grace — that is the long-hope tradition, and the author defends it elsewhere13 — without affirming that all the world's religions are equally true paths. The first claim is biblical. The second is not.
"You are God." Some NDE accounts include moments where the experiencer reports being told (or coming to know) that "you are God too" — that the divine essence and the human essence are identical. This is a denial of the Creator-creature distinction at the foundation of biblical theology and cannot be received as Christian. Pastorally, this kind of content often turns out to be the experiencer's reaching for words to describe an overwhelming union-in-love that the Christian tradition would describe in other ways. The experiencer is not always lying; the experiencer is often misinterpreting. But the misinterpretation has to be named.
Moral inversion. Rarely but occasionally, NDE accounts include content directly subversive of biblical morality — a "Being" who endorses behavior Scripture forbids; a "Light" who teaches that there is no judgment because there is no real evil. This kind of content is rare in the well-documented literature but real in the popular fringe. It does not pass any of the five criteria, and it should be set aside.
The Christian tradition has always recognized that not every spiritual experience is from God. Some are demonic counterfeits, and some are the products of disordered psychology. The category is small in the documented NDE literature, but it is real, and pastoral discernment cannot pretend it does not exist.
Markers of likely counterfeit content include: direct anti-Christian instruction; encouragement of practices Scripture forbids (occult contact, séance, divination); a "spiritual entity" who exalts the experiencer over against the church and Scripture; long-term fruit characterized by pride, secrecy, manipulation, or moral collapse; a felt presence accompanied by fear and a desire to escape that the Christian tradition has historically associated with demonic encounter rather than with the encounter with God.14
I want to be careful here. The temptation in some Christian circles is to label as "demonic" anything strange or unfamiliar. That is not what discernment requires. Most NDE accounts are not demonic counterfeits. Most are not even theologically problematic. Most fall into Categories A and B. Category D exists, and we should know how to recognize it, but we should not see it everywhere.
One further note before we move on. Some NDE accounts that look on the surface like Category D — frightening, dark, distressing — turn out, on closer examination, not to be counterfeit at all. They are, on examination, accounts of an unprepared soul's encounter with the holy God experienced as terror precisely because the soul is not yet fit for that Presence. R. Zachary Manis develops this carefully in his "Divine Presence Model" of hell: the same encounter with God, Manis argues, is experienced as joy by the prepared soul and as torment by the unprepared, because what is unbearable to the unprepared is not God's distance but His unfiltered love.21 The author affirms Manis's phenomenological insight without endorsing the eternal-conscious-torment framework in which he develops it. The pastoral upshot for discernment is this: a frightening NDE is not, by itself, evidence of a counterfeit encounter. Howard Storm's case (Category A in the end) opened with a deeply distressing phase. The criterion that matters is what the experience moves the soul toward over the long horizon.
Objection — "Doesn't this just dismiss what God might be saying?"
I have heard this objection many times, often from sincere Christians who have been deeply moved by an NDE memoir and who feel that running the account through five criteria is an act of faithlessness, not discernment. I take the worry seriously. But the alternative — receiving every NDE claim uncritically because it was framed in spiritual language — is not a Christian alternative. The New Testament itself commands us to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). The same God who may speak through extraordinary experiences also gave us Scripture, the creeds, and the long tradition of testing those experiences. To use that tradition is not to silence God; it is to listen for Him more carefully.
Sooner or later, almost every pastor encounters this. Someone in your church — a longtime member or a new visitor — pulls you aside and tells you something happened. They almost died. Or they were declared dead and came back. Or their spouse died, and they were at the bedside, and something shifted in the room. They want to talk. They are usually frightened, partly that the experience was real and partly that it was unreal. They want to be told that they are not crazy. They want to know whether you, their pastor, will hear them.
The first thing is to hear them. Not to evaluate. Not yet. Listen. Most NDErs in the published literature report that, in the years after their experience, the hardest thing was finding someone who would simply listen without flinching, dismissing, or running off to write a book about it. If you can be that someone for a member of your congregation, you have given them a great gift.
The second thing is to take the experience seriously. The temptation in some pastoral traditions is to wave NDE testimony away — "well, that was probably just the medications," or "people sometimes have very vivid dreams when they are dying" — as if the experiencer's perception is the problem. That is a pastorally serious mistake. It dismisses the person along with the experience. The experiencer is not a fool. The experience was, to them, more vivid and more real than ordinary waking life. Honor that.
The third thing is to introduce the framework — gently, not all at once, and only after the experiencer feels heard. You can begin to ask the kinds of questions the criteria above are pointing toward. What was the encounter like for you? Did you sense a Presence? How would you describe it now? Has anything in your life changed since? What have you found yourself drawn toward? Questions like these let the experiencer narrate the experience in their own words; the criteria can then do their work in the background, in your own listening, without your turning the conversation into a doctrinal interview.
The fourth thing is to be a pastor, not a debunker and not a sycophant. You are neither there to prove the experience never happened nor to confirm that the experiencer now has special spiritual insight unavailable to the rest of the congregation. You are there to help this person integrate what happened into a life of discipleship. That means affirming what is biblically sound and gently raising questions about what is not. It means asking how this experience is sending them toward Christ, the church, the means of grace — or whether it is, at any point, beginning to send them away from those things.
The fifth thing is patience. NDEs take years to integrate. Many experiencers report that the experience kept "unfolding" — kept teaching them new things — for a decade or more. Some return to faith only slowly. Some struggle deeply with the unrepeatable vividness of what they saw. A pastor who is patient, available, and theologically grounded is, over those years, exactly what the experiencer needs.
Pastoral — A Few Sentences You Can Use
"I want to hear all of it, in your own words, with no rush." — "Take your time. There is no part of this you have to translate for me." — "I am not going to tell you it was just the drugs. Something happened to you, and we are going to take it seriously." — "Can I ask: in the months since, what have you found yourself drawn toward? Toward prayer? Toward people? Toward Scripture?" — "There may be parts of what you experienced that I, as your pastor, will want to think about with you carefully, in light of Scripture. That is not because I doubt you. It is because I love you and want to walk this through with you well."
The popular NDE-publishing market is large and uneven. Some books in it are theologically sober and pastorally useful. Some are the work of careful researchers writing for the general reader. Some are popular memoirs by experiencers themselves, ranging from theologically grounded to theologically chaotic. Some are the work of writers who have built large followings on NDE content but whose theology should be approached with care. A pastor will not be able to read all of them. A few comments may help.
John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Baker, 2015). The major contemporary evangelical engagement with the NDE literature. Burke is a pastor, not a scholar, and his book has the strengths and weaknesses of pastor-popular writing — accessible, pastorally warm, occasionally too quick to harmonize a particular NDE detail with a particular Bible verse. But Burke is theologically sound, Christologically central, and uses NDE material in a manner consistent with a high view of Scripture. I recommend Burke widely.15
J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven (Wisdom Creek, 2012). Miller writes for the thoughtful Christian reader and engages the evidential case carefully. The book is shorter than Burke's and more focused on the apologetic question. Useful for parishioners who want a serious but readable evidential case.
Bruce Greyson, After (St. Martin's, 2021). Greyson is a secular psychiatric researcher (University of Virginia, the IANDS founder), not a Christian writer. The book is the most authoritative single-volume summary of fifty years of NDE research, written for the general reader. Christian discernment is required on theological framing, but the empirical content is reliable, and Christians who want a careful tour of the research literature can read Greyson with much profit.
Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life (HarperOne, 2010). Van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist and the author of the 2001 Lancet NDE study. The book combines clinical research, philosophical reflection, and some spirituality writing that is not Christian in framing. The empirical chapters are first-rate. The interpretive chapters require discernment. For a parishioner who is a physician or a scientist, van Lommel is often the right introduction.
Howard Storm, My Descent into Death (Doubleday, 2005). The autobiographical account of Storm's distressing-then-converting NDE. The book is theologically sound (Storm became a United Church of Christ pastor), Christologically central, and one of the most striking conversion narratives of the twentieth century. I have given this book to skeptics and watched it open doors that argument could not.
Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, recounts his own remarkable NDE during bacterial meningitis. The empirical and medical layers of the account are striking; the theological framing is post-Christian and sometimes universalist in an unguarded sense. A pastor who recommends Alexander should plan to read alongside the parishioner and supply the framework Alexander does not.25
Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven (Revell, 2004). Piper's account is theologically conservative and has comforted many. The major caution is the popular-Christian temptation to treat the account as if it had revelatory authority. Piper himself does not make that claim; the surrounding culture sometimes does.
Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2010); God and the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2016). Long, a radiation oncologist, runs the NDERF database that contributed thousands of cases to the dissertation analysis.27 His empirical work is genuinely helpful. His theological framing is broadly inclusive in ways that move past historic Christianity at points. Use as data, not as theology.
Mary C. Neal, To Heaven and Back (Waterbrook, 2012). Neal is a Christian and her account is theologically grounded; the book has helped many readers. Some of the more specific claims (about the timing and choreography of postmortem encounters) go beyond what NDE evidence can establish; readers should hold those parts loosely.
I will not name specific titles here, because the popular market shifts quickly and a list dated to one year will be out of date by the next. The categories to watch for, however, do not change. Books whose central claim is that NDE evidence proves universalism in a way that bypasses Christ. Books whose central claim is that NDE evidence proves reincarnation. Books whose central claim is that the experiencer has acquired ongoing prophetic or mediumistic abilities through the experience. Books whose central frame is that the institutional church is the obstacle and the experiencer is the channel of new revelation. None of these is a categorical disqualifier in itself; together they are markers of a book that is using NDE material to advance a theology Christians cannot endorse without serious modification.
A simple practical rule: if a book is on the recommended-reading list of a fully secular New Age organization and on the recommended-reading list of a sound evangelical pastor, it is probably worth engaging. If it appears only on one of those lists, that tells you something about whose project the book is serving.
The same rule applies to NDE conferences and online communities. The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) is a serious research organization with a journal (Journal of Near-Death Studies) and an annual conference.26 The conference includes both empirical research presentations and experiencer testimony, and the theology is broadly inclusive in a way Christians cannot simply adopt. Christians have attended IANDS for decades and have benefited from the empirical work; some have also been quietly winsome witnesses inside that community. A pastor with a parishioner curious about NDE conferences should not forbid attendance and should also help the parishioner go in with a frame.
Smaller NDE-themed online communities and YouTube channels vary widely. Some are run by sober researchers; many are run by experiencers without theological training; a small number are doing things — promoting reincarnation, contact with "guides," past-life regression — that Christians should not endorse. Discernment.
The following is the practical tool I have developed, refined in pastoral use, and now use whenever I am asked to evaluate an NDE account. It compresses the criteria into a sequence of questions you can run through in a single sitting. The questions are deliberately simple; the work they require is not.
Veridical Layer
— Did the experiencer report any verifiable observations during the period of unconsciousness or clinical death?
— Are those observations independently corroborated (medical records, witness testimony, physical details verifiable after the fact)?
— Were the observations made under conditions in which ordinary sensory access was demonstrably absent?
Christological Criterion
— Does the encountered Presence draw the experiencer toward Christ, or away from Him?
— What does the experiencer now say about Jesus that they did not say before?
— Has the experiencer's life moved closer to Christ, the church, the means of grace, over time?
Biblical Compatibility
— Are the major elements of the account consistent with biblical anthropology (body and soul; soul conscious in dying)?
— Are they consistent with biblical eschatology (judgment; the moral seriousness of the encounter; the love of God; the final hope)?
— Where elements diverge from Scripture, are they part of the core experience or part of the experiencer's later interpretation?
Trinitarian Coherence
— Is the encountered Presence personal, holy, and distinct from the experiencer (Creator-creature distinction preserved)?
— Is the account compatible with the historic doctrine of the Trinity?
Moral and Spiritual Fruit
— Over years, what fruit has the experience produced in the experiencer's character and relationships?
— Is the fruit of the kind Galatians 5:22–23 describes?
— Has the experience produced humility or spiritual pride?
Theological Orthodoxy
— Where the experiencer's account speaks theologically, does it line up with the Apostles', Nicene, and Chalcedonian creeds?
— Where it does not, can the disagreement be plausibly read as the experiencer's misinterpretation of a real encounter, or does it require us to reject the account at that point?
Overall Pastoral Reading
— Is this an account I can receive with gratitude, with the usual humility about personal testimony?
— Is this an account I can receive in part, holding loosely the theologically problematic interpretive overlay?
— Is this an account whose problems are sufficient that I cannot receive it, even though I can love and continue to serve the experiencer?
Most accounts I encounter end up in the second category. The first is rarer than popular treatments suggest. The third is rarer than skeptical Christians sometimes assume. The middle category — accounts that need careful work to separate the wheat from the chaff — is where the bulk of pastoral discernment is done.
Case Study — One Pastoral Conversation, Walked Through
The woman with the paperback (the conversation that opened this appendix) walked away with a framework rather than a verdict. We agreed that the parts of the book describing the encounter with a luminous, loving Presence — the Presence who knew her sister, who held her sister, who invited her sister forward — were consistent with what Scripture and the Christian tradition would predict, and that she could think of her sister as having been received in love. We also agreed that the chapters in the book teaching reincarnation and pluralism were not ones she needed to absorb; they were the experiencer's interpretation, not the encounter itself. She left with permission to grieve her sister inside the historic Christian frame, encouraged rather than confused. That is what discernment is for.
I want to close where the chapter version of this material (Chapter 30) closes, but more briefly, because this is an appendix and the work has mostly been done.
The Christian tradition has always taught that the dying meet Christ. The Apostle Paul knew this, in language sober and certain, when he wrote that for him to die would be "to be with Christ, which is far better" (Philippians 1:23). Stephen knew it, when he saw the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). The patristic tradition knew it, when it taught that the Christ who descended at His own death continues to descend to every soul at the threshold of death.16 The historic deathbed liturgies knew it.29 The pastors who sat with the dying down through the centuries knew it. We have been taught to expect that, when we cross the boundary, we will be met.28
The NDE evidence, read carefully, supports that expectation. It does so empirically, in a way the earlier tradition could not have produced. It also, at the same time, supports it with an unsettling consistency — the same encounter, again and again, in cardiac-arrest patients in Norway and India and Japan and Iowa, in lifelong Christians and lifelong agnostics, in 80-year-olds and 4-year-olds, in scholars and in the unschooled. The Christ who descends meets the dying. The evidence is now strong enough that the burden of proof has shifted; it is the denial that needs an account, not the affirmation.
But — and this is the discernment we have been working on for the last several thousand words — not every claim made in the name of an NDE is reliable. Not every interpretation an experiencer gives is a teaching the church can absorb. Not every popular memoir on the bookstore shelf is theologically sound. The Christian way through this material is the way the church has always come through extraordinary experience: receive what is true; refuse what is not; love the experiencer; honor the encounter; submit the whole to Scripture. If we do that — and if we do it patiently, generously, without fear — then the testimony of the dying becomes, in our hands, what God may have intended it to be all along: a confirming witness to what He has been telling us in His Word for two thousand years.
The dying have something to teach us. We have not always known how to listen. The frameworks in this appendix are an attempt to learn.
↑ 1. Matthew Friend, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism within the Conditional Immortality Debate (Th.D. dissertation, Trinity College of the Bible and Trinity Theological Seminary, 2025). The dataset comprised 832 cases drawn from peer-reviewed scholarly sources and 4,446 cases from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and IANDS online databases. The dissertation's Appendix B sketched a preliminary framework for Christian discernment of NDE testimony; the present appendix expands that material into a working pastoral resource.
↑ 2. The full evidential case for that claim is developed in Chapter 23; see also the case-file chapters (Chapter 10 through Chapter 14). The empirical claim is not that every NDE reports veridical content; it is that a substantial body of well-documented veridical cases — accurate distant observations during periods of documented absence of brain activity — bears directly on the question of whether consciousness can persist apart from the brain.
↑ 3. The relationship between Scripture and other sources of theological knowledge is treated formally in the Reformed tradition (sola Scriptura as sola rather than solo), in Wesleyan terms (the so-called Quadrilateral, with Scripture as the primary authority), and in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox terms (Scripture in unbroken tradition). All three traditions agree on the central point: extraordinary spiritual experience does not function at the level of inspired Scripture and must be tested by it. See John Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), Ch. 1.
↑ 4. The methodological framework for what counts as veridical is developed in Chapter 8; the dissertation's three-dimensional scoring system is reproduced in Appendix A.
↑ 5. The cross-cultural data are surveyed in Chapter 29. See also Allan Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death, 3rd ed. (Norwalk, CT: Hastings House, 1997). The core phenomenology (out-of-body awareness, transition, encounter with a luminous Presence, life review) appears with surprising consistency across cultures; the interpretive overlay tracks the experiencer's prior religious frame.
↑ 6. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Edwards's twelve "signs" of gracious affections (Part III) remain the gold-standard discernment framework in the evangelical tradition; many of the criteria below have a recognizable Edwardsean structure.
↑ 7. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm's case is treated more fully in the discussion of distressing NDEs in Chapter 28.
↑ 8. Friend, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for Substance Dualism, Chapter 5. The compatibility scoring methodology distinguished four levels: high compatibility, moderate compatibility, low compatibility, and incompatibility. The 87 percent figure aggregates the first two categories.
↑ 9. The aftereffects literature is summarized in Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021), chs. 11–13; see also Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984), Part Three.
↑ 10. The patristic descent tradition is treated more fully in Chapter 25. The key primary sources include Ignatius of Antioch (Magn. 9.2), Justin Martyr (Dial. 72), Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 4.27.2), Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6.6), and Origen. See Jeffrey Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), for the indispensable historical study.
↑ 11. Augustine, Confessions 9.10 (the vision at Ostia); Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, Ch. X; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, longer text, chs. 5–6; Jonathan Edwards, "Personal Narrative" and "The Christian Pilgrim." None of these writers collapses the Creator-creature distinction; all describe the soul's union with God in language of Light, fire, and indwelling love.
↑ 12. The tendency for life-review content to be reinterpreted through prior frameworks is documented in the dissertation's qualitative analysis. The phenomenon is also recognized by secular researchers; see Mark Fox, Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), Ch. 4.
↑ 13. The biblical and theological case for postmortem opportunity is the subject of the author's earlier book Beyond the Grave: A Biblical Theology of the Long Hope; the historical case is developed in The Long Hope; the verse-by-verse engagement with restrictivism is the subject of Death Is Not the Deadline. See also James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021); Stephen Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is Salvation Possible in the Afterlife? (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014).
↑ 14. The Christian tradition's discernment of demonic encounter is summarized helpfully in the appendix to John Cassian's Conferences (esp. Conf. 2 on discernment) and in the distinctions drawn by Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises (the "Rules for the Discernment of Spirits"). The criteria include the encounter's effect on the soul (consolation versus desolation), the encounter's relation to the moral law, and the encounter's long-term fruit. None of these criteria, applied to the broad NDE literature, supports a wholesale "demonic" reading; applied to specific accounts, they sometimes do.
↑ 15. John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). Burke's strengths and weaknesses as a popular evangelical engagement with the NDE literature are treated more fully in the discussion of evangelical NDE engagement in Chapter 7 and Chapter 30.
↑ 16. The patristic tradition's "every-soul descent" theme — that the same Christ who descended to the dead at His own crucifixion meets every dying soul at the threshold — is developed at length in Chapter 25. The theme connects the descent passages (Eph. 4:9; 1 Pet. 3:18–20; 4:6) with the contemporary NDE evidence in a way the earlier tradition could not have anticipated and could only have welcomed.
↑ 17. The "Cambridge Companion to Christian Discernment" tradition surveys this literature; see also the influential chapter on testing extraordinary experience in J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit's Power (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). For an Eastern Orthodox approach, see Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995).
↑ 18. The point that Christological centrality is the deepest discernment criterion is made forcefully by Jonathan Edwards (Religious Affections, sign 1) and is the consistent witness of the broader tradition. See also John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, II.22, on the priority of Christ as the touchstone of all spiritual experience.
↑ 19. Vicki Umipeg's case is documented in Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999), and treated in detail in Chapter 11.
↑ 20. Howard Storm's account, beyond the autobiography cited above, is also discussed in John Burke, Imagine Heaven, esp. chs. 12 and 18, and in the broader discussion of distressing-then-converting NDEs in P. M. H. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2007).
↑ 21. The discernment framework presented here can be used alongside the framework R. Zachary Manis develops in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), Part III. Manis's "Divine Presence Model" — that the same encounter with God is experienced as joy by the prepared soul and as torment by the unprepared — is a useful phenomenological resource for thinking about why some NDEs are profoundly distressing while others are profoundly joyful, even where the underlying encounter appears structurally similar. The author affirms Manis's phenomenological insight without endorsing the eternal-conscious-torment framework in which Manis develops it.
↑ 22. The 2 Corinthians 5:6–8 / Philippians 1:23 evidence for the conscious intermediate state is treated exegetically in Chapter 24. The Pauline argument is, in summary, that for the apostle "at home in the body" and "at home with the Lord" are the two states between which a Christian alternates, with no third "unconscious" state imagined; death is the transition from the first to the second.
↑ 23. The theological account of life review — including its consistency with Romans 14:12 ("each of us will give an account of himself to God") and 2 Corinthians 5:10 ("we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ") — is developed in Chapter 22. The life-review phenomenology in the documented NDE cases is, on its face, more consistent with the New Testament's vision of accountability than with any of the modern alternatives.
↑ 24. See Heb. 9:27: "It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment." The verse is sometimes cited as a closing of the door on any postmortem opportunity for repentance; the better reading (cf. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, ch. 4; Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave, ch. 3) is that it teaches the singularity of physical death (no reincarnation) and the certainty of judgment, not the timing of all opportunity for response. The verse's plain meaning is fully compatible with the long-hope tradition the author defends elsewhere, and is in any case decisive against reincarnation framings of NDE content.
↑ 25. The Eben Alexander case has generated extensive secondary literature; for a careful evangelical assessment, see John Burke, Imagine Heaven, ch. 14, and J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek, 2012), ch. 5. The medical layer of Alexander's case is widely regarded as remarkable; the interpretive overlay is the locus of the discernment task.
↑ 26. The IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies) was founded in 1981 and publishes the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Christian engagement with IANDS dates from the early 1980s; among the most fruitful contributions has been the work of Christian researchers within the broader IANDS community who have brought theological seriousness to bear on the empirical data. The author commends respectful engagement; the author also commends discernment in equal measure.
↑ 27. Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016). Long's empirical work, based on the NDERF database, has been an indispensable resource for the dissertation; his theological framing is best read alongside more rigorously orthodox engagements such as Burke and Miller.
↑ 28. The phrase "the Christ who descends meets every soul at the threshold" is the author's summary of the patristic descent tradition's pastoral implication and is developed at length in Chapter 25. Cf. the patristic Odes of Solomon, esp. Ode 42, on the descended Christ proclaiming to the dead.
↑ 29. The closing pastoral note draws on the historic Christian deathbed tradition, especially the Ars Moriendi of the fifteenth century; Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651); and the modern recovery in Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), and Lydia Dugdale, The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom (New York: HarperOne, 2020). The frameworks in this appendix are tools in service of that older, deeper pastoral tradition.